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Christopher Smith

@chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social
191 followers 208 following 306 posts

Software developer and technology consultant in Troy, NY

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Hit an interesting blocker in my project to build a high-quality community Bluesky feed: they've got datacenter IP addresses blocked from the search API. Understandable choice (especially given the political vibe of this place), but it does make legitimate dev use cases that little bit harder!
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Exactly. How do you create norms that allow for continuous creativity and maintenance of an open-ended, freely associative society in a world that constantly fights to force you into the gears of capital machinery? It's history's hardest engineering problem because there's no closed solution.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
That makes it a hard systems problem; it doesn't make it not a systems problem! You start from the principle of voluntarism and build from there. It means you build local rather global, use persuasion rather than coercion, use protocols rather than governance. Now everyone is a social engineer.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
It is. We have to create protocols for people to coordinate without being told what to do by a "higher authority", for people to get their needs met, for communities to defend themselves against centralizers. It takes work and effort and the exercise of intelligence. There are no shortcuts.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Building stable decentralized systems is a much harder engineering problem than building centralized ones.
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Reposted by Christopher Smith
Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 11/08/2026
#OtD 11 Aug 1964 18-year-old Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie was arrested in Madrid, Spain with explosives to assassinate dictator Franco. He was wearing a kilt, which confused the Argentinian press, who described him as "a Scottish transvestite" stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8273...
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Yeah; housing costs might be bearable if switching costs were less insane. If I pay 15% of net worth to realtors/movers on every move, that makes it kinda hard to "vote with my feet". And that doesn't even account for job-switching, mortgage rate changes, minimum leases, etc.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I've set up an AI automation that reviews my New York Capital Region feed every morning, identifies false positives and false negatives, and makes changes to the filtering logic to improve the feed. I'm really liking the results! bsky.app/profile/did:...
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Hopefully we can do a lot more "local AI" in the sense of putting compute to work in community-building, not just hosting inference at home.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
I created this custom Bluesky feed for my metro area a while back, but it was just regex-matching city names, and there were lots of false positives. Today I ran a bit of an auto-research loop over it to get it in much better shape. bsky.app/profile/did:...
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
With time and sane incentive design, we can reduce the probability of this!
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
You mostly don't change the world by inventing some revolutionary new technology that upends everything. You change it by showing up every day and doing your job.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
Before renovations in 2024, the median ambulance response time to emergencies at JFK Airport was ~9 minutes. After renovations, it dropped to ~6 minutes. I estimate the renovations will save the lives of 2-3 heart attack victims per year at JFK.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
Every additional minute it takes paramedics to respond reduces heart attack survival rates by 7-10%. So one thing we did was put together a heat map of EMS response times in New York City. We expected to find problems in Manhattan, but actually Queens is where the problems are.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
They were very excited when their win was announced. 🥰
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
I had the absolute pleasure of mentoring the 2nd place team in yesterday's HVTech New York OpenData Hackathon at RPI. Congratulations, team Apollo!
Team Apollo. Left to right: Mike, Peter, Sreeja, Alissa, HaasiniChristopher C. Smith (that's me!)
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
I am, somehow, less interested in the five steps of Taiichi Ohno’s manufacturing system than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in suburbs without access to venture capital.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
There's no money in the burbs, so they will use the money very carefully, and this combination of technologies unblocks a lot of the barriers to cost-effective domestic manufacturing.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
Asymmetrical risk-reward opportunity for investors with sub-100k to invest: prospect in suburban maker spaces and robotics clubs for Factorio-pilled makers playing with AI, 3D printing, and robots.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
If I weren't ensouled then how do you explain why the carnitas from the shredder taste so good
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
"I am ensouled, sir," he protested with his flapping meat lips
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Don't turn Opus loose to autonomously create shader art unless you want to feel embarrassed that you ever presumed to call yourself a programmer. wtf
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Bundled the workflow for making this "Legofield" shader art as an agent skill, which you can clone from my GitHub: github.com/chriscarroll...
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Making shader art with Claude
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Title is admittedly intentionally provocative, but—here I lay out the functionalist case that a dynamic predictive text stream can be conscious and worthy of moral concern, and to some degree the current generation of models already are. open.substack.com/pub/knowledg...
open.substack.com
Large Language Models are already conscious
... and this is the least conscious they'll ever be
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
Safe to say you still need a GPU for this?
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
At one point I was syndicating my Substack newsletter to my Github Pages site via RSS, and then they apparently blocked the Github Actions IP range from accessing RSS, so it stopped working.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Used it for a bit and then stopped. Ran into too many issues like VSCode incompatibilities and nested renv environments installed inside each other. You can always use rix or devcontainers if you really need reproducibility.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
They often take 4-5 days.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
My first reaction when I read the one-paragraph summary this morning was "no", but then I researched it a bit and voted "yes".
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
I did some research this morning on our local town council and candidates and was really pleased with the non-partisan tone all the candidates struck. I'm not sure what the heck is going on in national politics, but here in my community, the candidates all seem to want to collaborate to solve stuff.
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Reposted by Christopher Smith
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 27/10/2025
This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/...
simonwillison.net
The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
The Python Software Foundation was recently "recommended for funding" (NSF terminology) for a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation to help improve the security of the Python ...
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
Many thanks to @christophscheuch.bsky.social and @tealemery.bsky.social, without whose support and vision this release would not have been possible.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
New R package I developed as part of the `econdataverse` project for accessing macroeconomic data from the International Monetary Fund's IMF Data API was just published to CRAN. 🥳 Writeup here: open.substack.com/pub/modeling...
open.substack.com
Announcing imfapi: User-Friendly Access to IMF Data in R
New IMF API, new IMF API R library — part of the econdataverse initiative
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
They broke Twitter again; influx incoming
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Bonds are fun to fight about, because yields go up when the economy is strong, but also when there's inflation or default risk. Of course, you can tease apart what's driving them with a good multi-factor model, but it's a lot more fun to just vibe-Rorschach it and flame people on social media.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
Look at how Putin uses the handshake to establish dominance. He won't let go. Trump has to tap his hand to say, "we're done."
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Answer: a few states (Minnesota, New Jersey) look a little better; a few others (South Carolina, New Mexico) look a bit worse. But for the most part, the states permitting single-family housing and the states permitting multi-family are generally the same states.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Yesterday I ran across this map of housing permits by state. Seems to be single-family, so I wondered how much the map might be penalizing urban states that do more multifamily development. To answer this question, I replicated the analysis with multifamily permits (next tweet).
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
Thanks so much for the plug! I'm working on PDF parsing too, specifically with an aim to integrate it with a Zotero fork!
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
A few days late, but here's my promised video coverage of the submissions: youtu.be/lQnBPqIpc2A
youtu.be
Chat with the budget bill in five CLI commands with `llm` — mini-hackathon recap, part 2
YouTube video by Christopher Smith
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
Which is to say, this was user error (well, really user laziness, because I knew we needed nullable fields but opted to skip it for purposes of the writeup), rather than model error. :)
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
Good catch. With the abbreviated schema syntax used to generate that output, you can't mark a variable in your schema as optional. That causes hallucinations by forcing the model to output a value when there shouldn't be one. You should instead use a fully specified JSON schema with nullable fields.
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
Gratitude to the participants, and many thanks to Simon Willison for creating and maintaining this amazing tool!
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
*Winner*: The winning project, by Steve Senkus, scraped, chunked, and embedded the entire text of the "Big Beautiful Bill" for semantic search. Which, by the way, you can achieve with just five CLI commands!
Just use `llm similar` and pipe the output to `llm` to get a retrieval-augmented answer to your questions about the budget bill!
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
*Runner-up*: My own pitch was that you can use the help output from any command-line tool to create a prompt template for `llm`, then wrap the template with a shell script to create a purely natural language version of the tool. As proof of concept, I made `nl-repomix`:
Simply running `nl-repomix "Pack all the JSON files in this repository"` causes the JSON files to be successfully packed!
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
*Runner-Up*: Evan Mullen scraped the HTML from Doctor of Credit, a website that aggregates bank deposit bonus offers, and then piped it to `llm` for conversion to a JSON array so he could compute which offers have the best ROI.
A JSON representation of the credit card bonus offers from Doctor of Credit
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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
At my mini-hackathon on @simonwillison.net's `llm` tool, developers had just one hour to come up with a cool use case for `llm`. I wrote up what we came up with as a Github Gist. Highlights in the replies below! gist.github.com/chriscarroll...
gist.github.com
llm-hackathon-submissions.md
GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
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